


The Motorbike

by Erato_Muse



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child - Thorne & Rowling
Genre: Birthday Fluff, Birthday Presents, F/M, Family, Sirius Black's Flying Motorbike
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-20
Updated: 2020-09-20
Packaged: 2021-03-07 22:08:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 990
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26564872
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Erato_Muse/pseuds/Erato_Muse
Summary: Harry is gifted with Sirius's flying motorbike for his 40th birthday.
Relationships: Harry Potter/Ginny Weasley
Kudos: 14





	The Motorbike

**Author's Note:**

  * For [CurrerJean](https://archiveofourown.org/users/CurrerJean/gifts).



> Happy Birthday, @CurrerJean. Thanks for teaching me Zen and the Art of Ginny Weasley, and I hope this makes up for that one scene in 'The Alchemist's Daughter'. You know the one! Lol. I love you very much.

The air was redolent with salt and ripe fruit, of the sea just a few miles off and the apple orchard just past the orchard meadow, mingling to a bouquet of land and sea, blowing the smell about in the wuthering breeze around the Potters’ two-story Tudor cottage in rural Devonshire. Harry, Ginny, James, and Albus stood around the large, gleaming black motorcycle parked in the meadow, which looked like some metallic species of medieval warhorse. The gift tag hanging from one handlebar declared,  
“Happy birthday, Harry!”  
It was the same lumpy and childlike handwriting that had declared the same on Harry’s first-ever birthday cake when he was just 11.  
“Dad, who’s given you a motorbike?” Albus asked, his intense green eyes regarding the motorbike with a glint of fear, as if it would come to life and bite.  
“Some anonymous Harry Potter superfan, who’s mistaken Dad for someone cool. You can pawn it for a toy train, Dad, no harm done,” James said, with his characteristic cheeky smile.  
Harry rolled his eyes affectionately in his eldest son’s direction.  
“I know exactly where this bike’s come from, James-shows how much you know,” Harry said, and for good measure stuck his tongue out at James in a very adult and respectable raspberry that Peeves the Hogwarts poltergeist alone could rival.  
James laughed with unabashed delight that someone was playing along with him. Albus scowled. Ginny smoldered with quiet laughter apparent only in the Mona Lisa smirk about her thin, pink lips, and blazing light brown eyes. Such was their way.  
“Where’s it come from, then, Dad?” Albus asked.  
“That’s sort of a round-about answer,” Harry said, meeting his gaze to show Albus that he was focusing completely on him and answering his question fully. “Hagrid delivered me to the Dursleys on this motorbike, when I was just a baby. And, then he gave it to your Granddad for repairs…that sort of took over a decade. You know how he likes to tinker around with Muggle objects.”  
“ ‘Artifacts of an adjacent civilization’, Dad used to call them,” Ginny quipped.  
“But, originally, it belonged to my godfather, Sirius Black,” Harry concluded.  
James’s eyes lit up, in recognition of his namesake. “So, now its your’s, and then I get it, right? Right? This is the motorbike you said you dreamed about when you were a little boy, isn’t it, Dad? Isn’t it? It flies, doesn’t it? So, I can have it after you, right?”  
“Yes, but, you see James, I’m not dead yet, am I?” Harry snapped.  
He instantly regretted it. James was exuberant, happy, at ease with himself, and hardly knew when he was sprinting across a boundary of propriety with his happy-go-lucky nature.  
“I can wait,” James retorted breezily, and shrugged happily. Harry laughed, and affectionately ruffled James’s hair, feeling relieved.  
‘We’d be dealing with the fallout from that for a month and more, if it was Al,’ he thought to himself, and then felt mentally cross with himself again for comparing his two sons: one easygoing, one thin-skinned, one happier than Harry had ever been as a child, the other so unhappy with so little cause that the outside world could explain. It was as if one boy had been split into two, one taking all the dark, the other all the light.  
He turned his thoughts to other things. However it would end with Al and James, one day’s musings wouldn’t produce the solution.  
“What was Sirius like, Dad?” Albus asked.  
Harry smiled. “He was…a free spirit,” he answered, trying to comb his memories of Sirius for something that he could tell his boys, something that perfectly exemplified him.  
Most of their relationship as godfather and godson had been carried out via letter, and Harry could count on just two hands the amount of times they met in person, that he could remember. As an adult, he could now admit things to himself about Sirius that he hadn’t been able to name or spot when he was a child: that he was erratic, depressive, prone to rages and fits of despondency, and probably a heavier drinker than he should have been, struggling to cope with the aftermath of his imprisonment. But, Harry knew beyond a shadow of doubt, had always been clear on one thing: that Sirius loved him. Maybe Harry had been the only person he truly loved. Maybe, for a time, Sirius had been the only person Harry felt safe loving. And when two people have that sort of bond, time is relative, and forgiveness need not even be asked for.  
“And…when I needed him, he was always there. He never kept me waiting,” Harry finished.  
Ginny met his eyes, and understood instantly what he meant. Their sons were less interested, and in a rare moment of unity began clamoring to see if the bike could really fly.  
Ginny held her hand out for the keys.  
“Quit whinging! We’ll see if it flies when I switch it on, won’t we?” she said, with pointedly strained patience. Since there was no more compelling inducement to be quiet than one’s mother's imminent displeasure, the boys were silenced.  
“You?” Harry asked skeptically.  
“I fly for a living, Potter,” she pointed out.  
“You’re retired, Potter. And Quidditch is played on broomstick. This is a bit more heavy duty, wouldn’t you say?” Harry said.  
Looking little amused, Ginny swung one skinny jean clad leg over the motorbike and when she was properly astride, said, “Get on the back, and hold on tight. Boys, if we die in flames raise your sister to be a lady, yeah?”  
James laughed, and, a rarity, so did Albus, both their lean adolescent bodies quivering with childish anticipation that turned to cheers when Ginny stuck the key in the ignition, and revved the motorbike’s engine to life. Harry held onto her waist tight as it took off, pointed towards the air, aimed over the orchard.


End file.
